Thursday, June 23, 2016

'No Fly, No Buy' Means No Freedom

The people in the government who want to control our personal choices
are the enemies of freedom. And the enemies of freedom can be very
clever and seductive.

Last week, these folks, manifesting their
lust to keep us dependent upon the government by rejecting the natural
right to self-defense, coined a clever phrase: "No fly, no buy." It
sounds rational, yet it rejects core American values.

The phrase
was pounded home to average Americans during a one-sided 15-hour
televised marathon on the floor of the Senate orchestrated by the gun
control crowd. The essence of the argument was that stricter laws
regarding gun sales would have prevented the massacre at the Pulse
nightclub in Orlando, Florida. In gun control advocates' dream world,
the self-loathing Islamic State-inspired killer, willing to take 49
innocent lives, would somehow have been unwilling to violate restrictive
gun purchase laws; and his obedience to those laws would have saved
lives.

Their argument is naive and absurd. A person willing to
commit mass murder is surely willing to break the law to acquire the
means to commit the murders. So blinded were these senators in their
misguided utterances about self-defense that they forgot about the
Constitution.

The legislation they offered would have required
that people whose names the feds put on a terror watchlist or a no-fly
list (these are often done simultaneously) would not be legally able to
purchase a gun. The senators summarized this idea dozens of times as "no
fly, no buy."

Though this phrase, which was quickly picked up by many of my
colleagues in the media, has an easy and simplistic ring to it, it
reveals a troubling ideology that profoundly rejects core American
values.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of
Independence that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable
rights and when the inalienability of our rights was codified in the
first 10 amendments to the Constitution, the United States was wedded to
the Judeo-Christian principle that our rights stem from our humanity.
This was expressly recognized recently by the Supreme Court in District
of Columbia v. Heller, in which it held that the right to keep and bear
arms is a fundamental personal right, not a gift of the government to a
group.

A fundamental personal right is the natural ability of
individuals to make meaningful choices without a government permission
slip. May the government ever interfere with fundamental rights? The
short answer is yes. The longer answer is that it can only do so if it
can demonstrate a compelling governmental interest -- served by the
least restrictive means, and only after due process.

Stated differently, if the government wants to silence
your speech or deny you the right to self-defense, it must meet a very
high burden in a public courtroom. It must demonstrate to a judge and
jury that its need to silence or disarm you is compelling, and its goals
may not be attained by any lesser means. Americans need not demonstrate
a compelling need to speak or bear arms; the government must
demonstrate a compelling need to prevent us from doing so.

That is
what lawyers call black letter law -- meaning it is well-established,
followed throughout the land and rarely challenged. Until now.

Earlier
this week in the Senate, the gun control crowd sought to give nameless
and faceless federal bureaucrats the ability to strip Americans of their
right to keep and bear arms by putting their names on a terror
watchlist/no-fly list and prohibiting those on the list from buying
guns. Yet none of these senators could state the criteria for putting a
name on that list, and none could identify the people who prepare or
keep the list.

That's because these are well-guarded government secrets -- secrets that have no place in American life.

If a government bureaucrat can put your name on a secret list
on the bureaucrat's own whim or even using secret standards and, as a
result, you have lost a fundamental liberty, then the feds have
transformed a natural right into a governmental gift. If the feds can
create a no-fly list in secret and "no fly" comes to mean "no buy," then
we have no rights but what the government will permit us to do.

As
if to underscore his ignorance of American values, one of the senators
even stated that due process is killing us. He must have forgotten his
oath to uphold the Constitution, which guarantees that the government
may not take life, liberty or property without due process.

Due
process -- the absolute right to know the law and to force the
government to prove a violation of it to a jury before it can take life,
liberty or property -- is the essence of the rights of free people. It
is utterly scandalous -- and probably disqualifying from office -- that a
senator could bemoan its existence.

Can you see how low we have
sunk? The gun control crowd doesn't care about personal liberty in a
free society; it just cares about control. It wants us all to be pliant
and reliant on a government that it controls; never mind that it is
utterly incapable of protecting us from crazies who will resort to mass
death for their own deranged purposes.

If the government secretly
can put an American's name on a secret list and, as a result, his
liberty is lost, then there are no freedoms -- just government-granted
privileges. And if it can do this to the natural rights to travel and
self-defense, can other fundamental rights be far behind?

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The Patriot Factor

I’m an American Patriot...part of the grassroots movement of bloggers spreading the truth about the corrupt and traitorous Obama regime and his sanctioned islamization of America. I'm also co-host with Craig Andresen of RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS on American Political Radio. http://tunein.com/radio/American-Political-Radio-s273246/